A team of Australian and English astrophysicists may have radically transformed
our understanding of the cosmos last week with a discovery suggesting
that the laws of physics (as we know them) may not apply to the whole
Universe!

The report is still being peer reviewed
(and pending publication in “Physical Review Letters”), but should the
discovery be verifiable it will be a historic revolution in our
understanding of how the Universe functions (and perhaps even how it was
created).

The inconsistency in the laws of Nature was found to lie in the universe’s fine-structure constant
(known as ‘alpha’). This multinational team measured the alpha of
around 300 distant galaxies using Chile’s Very Large Telescope (V.L.T.)
and correlated their findings with previously collected data from the
Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Although the constant varies by a minuscule
1 part in 100,000 over the observable universe, it opens the
possibility that larger differences could occur while casting potential
doubt on the consistency of other (supposed) Universal constants. Our
entire understanding of the Universe (and its creation) are hinged upon
the universal constants, for some of them to be variable will have a
drastic impact on this understanding.

Interestingly, Professor John Webb of the
University of New South Wales has indicated that the change “seemed to
vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe”. The
implications of this finding still have yet to be determined.

Should these results be verified, it would
finally shed some light on one of the greatest mysteries known to modern
science – “have the laws of physics been the same throughout space and
time?”

This is truly an exciting time to be a member of the Human race.

Written by: Ben Lovatt

UPDATE: While research is still ongoing into this matter, more recent observations are generally siding with this variability.